obese or malnourished?30 July 2004

<rant>
For the last few weeks I've been thinking on and off about the problem of obesity in the western world (or as my highschool geography teacher wanted us to use: the north). It seems that we are having lots of trouble with fat. There are loads of statistics that show an increase in the number of obese people. A quick google search will turn up many sources. Not only that, but there are so many diets, diet foods and other heavily marketed health foods an outsider could easily be mistaken into thinking we are having a lot of trouble just staying skinny.

Now I have a solution to this problem: The people who need to shed a few pounds should go and trade places with a malnourished african child for a few weeks. The child could do with some good sizeable feeds, while the person in need of some weight loss would have the perfect weight loss diet: a few small meals of rice a day.

But the thing that gets me is the cause of the obesity problem. I reckon the cause is greed. We are fat because we have too much and we like to keep it to ourselves. We are fat because we have no time to exercise because we work a high paying job to keep up with the mortgage repayments on our expensive homes.

And while we get fat on our wealth, the rest of the world is starving to death.

Gotta love that. We have so much we have trouble with our health, while people in poorer parts of the world suffer from health problems for exactly the opposite reason.

So may I take a moment to encourage people to exercise - make use of all that stored energy. If you can't do that then eat properly - there is no point in feeding a slow metabolism lots of energy. Finally you could always forego some of your monetary wealth and contribute to evening up the global distribution. Obesity is a sad problem, but the real cause needs to addressed.
</rant>

There. I got that out of my system. Sorry to be a bit preachy. I think I inherited that attribute.